Tuesday, November 5, 2013

The Real Hillary Clinton Scandal

The
Republican case against Hillary Clinton over the supposed scandal in Benghazi
was always thin at best.You have to
remember that this scandal emerged because Mitt Romney, then running for
President (what an outlandish idea?How did
we ever contemplate such an absurdity?) couldn’t be bothered to tell the
difference between Libya and Egypt and therefore mistook reports coming out of
the latter for commentary on the former. The GOP scented a scandal.But instead of letting facts carry the day, after
it was clear that the mishap resulted from their candidate’s stupidity rather
than anything the administration said or did, the GOP began to manufacture a
scandal.

But
now it would be nice if we could put Benghazi aside and focus on the real
scandal surrounding Hillary Clinton’s assumed run for the presidency in 2016.Because there is one.And it’s not some crackpot conspiracy that’s
so well hidden you eventually realise it never existed, but rather something
that’s right out in the open.

I
refer, of course, to the fact that the former Senator and Secretary of State is
for all intents and purposes, a practising neoconservative.That’s right, in her foreign policy outlook,
she is basically representative of the same sadistic ideology so spectacularly
repudiated by American votes in the successive elections in 2006 and 2008.

Clinton
entered the Senate the year of 9/11, and many of her labours there were defined
by an effort to appear “tough on terror”.This mean that she rubber-stamped the administration’s headlong rush
into a now 12-year war in Afghanistan.We have not only failed to extricate ourselves from this war which has
conspicuously failed to eradicate the threat of terrorism, but which instead
has promoted its fluorescence.We have
steadily expanded the war such that it is now waged in neighbouring Pakistan.Clinton also signed up to the neoconservative
drive to expand the security state via the Patriot Act.

When
presented with a transparently manufactured case against Iraq, Clinton
demonstrated an inability or disinclination to sift through contradictory where
not outright inaccurate “evidence”, and opted to rubber stamp our march towards
a terroristic war of aggression.That
war—it claimed the lives of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of
Iraqis, whose cities and infrastructure were reduced to rubble—not only created
new threats to our citizenry, but with that in Afghanistan spawned a matrix of
terroristic activities.Torture,
rendition, disappearance, abduction, and targeted killings have all soiled our
nation and destroyed the lives of thousands of people around the world.

In
2008, President Obama argued that we needed to reorient our relations with the
family of nations.But not only did he
find himself trapped by the hard-charging generals who used media appearances to
subvert the central premise of civilian control over policy, he also appointed
the likes of Hillary Clinton to a key national security post, from which she
advocated for an escalation of the war in Afghanistan and pushed for the
expansion of the U.S. War of Terror to Somalia, Yemen, and North Africa.

The
popular risings of the Arab Spring represented one of the greatest
opportunities for democratisation our world had seen in a generation.But Hillary Clinton (together with Joe Biden)
urged the President to side with our long-time supporters—ruthless dictators
and keptocratic royal families—at the expense of the people pleading for
democracy.That outlook, which
ultimately prevailed, turned a moment of extraordinary potential into one of
great danger and uncertainty, and meant that the United States will be
remembered as a friend of authoritarianism and an enemy of democracy in that
region for some time to come.

At
a time when our approach to international affairs is so obviously inadequate
and needs re-thinking, it is absurd to contemplate the enthronement—and make no
mistake, the Democratic Party has no interest in a competitive primary election—of
a politician who has eschewed critical thinking in her execution of foreign
policy.Hillary Clinton has shown a
scandalous subservience to the logic of the military industrial machine.She has evinced a scandalous disinclination
to rock the boat.And her judgment about
matters of war and peace has been scandalously poor.Hillary Clinton offers more of the same at a
time when “more of the same” is literally killing Americans and other global
citizens, and making our world a more frightening, insecure, and violence-prone
place, where shouting “terrorists!”, as Clinton has done, excuses whatever
stream of viciously violent illogic follows.

Those—not
Benghazi—are the real scandals.Of
course the Republican Party does not want to talk about such scandals, because
it, even more than Hillary Clinton, is responsible for the self-inflicted damage
that the waging of terroristic wars of aggression and the support for
authoritarian regimes has dealt to the United States.But they are scandals which we should bear in
mind during the coming years and which make Hillary Clinton’s presidential
candidacy absurdly inappropriate.

About Me

I am from Northern California, and am the fifth generation of my family to have lived in the Golden State. Now I live next-door in the Silver State, where I research and write about colonialism and decolonization in Africa, teach European, African, environmental, and colonial history, and write this blog, mostly about politics, sometimes about history, and occasionally about travels or research.